The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History (42 page)

The RAF remained silent during this period, but far from inactive, as a process of discussion and research that had been going on for some time now neared completion. As we have seen, there had been years of reflection, not only about whether or not to continue the armed struggle, but also about how to renew the guerilla's ties to the movement. Events seemed to be showing that the underground-all-the-way strategy had been bested by the RZ's “after hours” fluidity. Especially as every month brought new RZ attacks, which both the
Autonomen
and the capitalist media compared favorably to those of the RAF, who some now referred to as “grandpa's guerillas.”

Indeed, those RAF members at large did have a lot of experience under their belts, in both the aboveground movements and in the guerilla. Individuals like Heidi Schulz and Christian Klar had come up through the 1970s squatting scene, the prisoner support movement, and the disastrous ‘77 offensive. Others, such as Brigitte Mohnhaupt and Helmut Pohl, could trace their involvement all the way back to the so-called “first generation,” and had done hard prison time, surviving hunger strikes and isolation. Yet while they had experienced the hopes and shortcomings of the APO, and could provide a personal connection to the guerilla's history, their ideas had continued to evolve. In the period since ‘77 they had been grappling with these developments, discussing them internally and also with trusted supporters; eventually, as part of this process, they had begun to reexamine some of the guerilla's historic suppositions.

This discussion process would eventually take form in a new document,
The Guerilla, the Resistance, and the Anti-Imperialist Front,
appearing in the spring of 1982. More commonly known as the May Paper, this was the first major theoretical document to be released by the RAF in almost ten years, and as such it was widely read both within the scene and throughout the broader left, especially after
taz
published a slightly edited version in its July 2 edition.
⁵

Building on observations that can be found in other statements dating from the attack on Haig, including even the 2JM's dissolution statement, the May Paper presented three main arguments.

First, that the guerilla and the militant left (the “resistance”) should unite in a single front. How this unity would work was unclear, given that the RAF was underground and continued to reject the idea of creating a legal organization. Nor was it discussed how the existence of such a front would play out in regard to the state's claims that there were aboveground RAF members. Despite these silences, the May Paper unambiguously reasserted that there was an important place reserved for the militant left in the RAF's anti-imperialist strategy. Clearly, the guerilla was trying to find a solution to the fact that some people who had been supporting them wanted to become politically active on a more militant level without going underground. A related question was how to broaden and deepen the mobilization and at the same time replenish the “pond” in which the guerilla was swimming.

While everything was left vague, what such a front might look like had been presaged in the mobilizations of previous years, in the way in which anti-imps would carry out low-level actions during hunger strikes and following each RAF attack. As the May Paper explained,

While establishing the nucleus of this new guerilla structure over the past two years, we have found that this coordination springs up spontaneously quite easily and that it is powerful—both subjectively and objectively—in material terms, opening up possibilities for attack. On the other hand, we have found that it is difficult to maintain the momentum necessary for this strategy to transcend the boundaries between separate political initiatives, actions, and limited practical contexts. That is the roadblock that must now be dismantled.

Besides taking a page from the RZ's playbook, the front idea may have also drawn on the negative experience with the GDR exiles. While Susanne Albrecht had been involved in militant support work for years before going under, and had participated in some of the guerilla's heaviest actions, she was the exception, for most of those who had gone East had been comrades who might have made good supporters, who might even have been suited for the level of activity engaged in by the RZ, but who found it difficult to cope with what it meant to be in the RAF. As we have seen, some of these individuals would claim to have never participated in any attacks: they apparently joined in the heat of the moment around ‘77, and having taken this step found that there was no turning back—they had no choice but to remain underground or face lengthy prison sentences. Had they surfaced, §129a would have been the least of the charges against them. It has been said that the other RAF members described the dropouts as
“our mistakes,”
⁶
and resolving the problem of what to do with them had finally fallen to Viett and the
Stasi.
The proposed front provided a place for militants who were not ready or suited for the underground, and as such, it might be hoped that it would prevent this problem from reoccurring.

The second revision in the May Paper concerned the potential for revolution in the First World, more commonly referred to as the “metropole” or even just the “center.” Whereas the RAF had traditionally held that theirs was a rearguard position, with the central struggle being found in the Third World, the May Paper argued that the struggle in the metropole had itself now become an important variable in the world revolution. The system was apparently slipping into deep crisis, and in its desperation might even resort to nuclear annihilation. At this critical juncture, imperialism needed to maintain its control everywhere at once; it therefore followed that it could be destabilized by resistance breaking out anywhere at any time.

Within this global field, pregnant with possibility, Western Europe was singled out as occupying a particularly important position, it being the “point of intersection between East and West, North and South, state and society,” a “cornerstone” for the world revolution, and “ripe” for radical change.

Although never explicitly stated, by repeatedly describing the proposed guerilla front as “West European” (as opposed to West German), the May Paper also raised the prospect of greater formal cooperation between guerillas in different countries, an idea that would be more fully taken up in due course. With some ambiguity, over the years to come, the term “the front” would be used to refer to each of these concepts: the front formed by aboveground and underground combatants, the front formed by the revolutionaries of the metropole and those of the Third World, and eventually even a front formed by different West European guerilla groups working together.

The May Paper's third theme was an appraisal of the events and consequences of ‘77. Admitting it had made mistakes, and that ‘77 had dealt the guerilla its largest setback to date, the RAF nevertheless proposed that the overall effect had been to push the movement forward:

[I]n the autumn of ‘77, all real opposition was faced with a new situation and new operating conditions, both in terms of the existing reality and in terms of the prospects for future struggle. This forced everyone to fundamentally redefine their relationship to power—or else renounce their identity…. This leap in
consciousness was the personal, living moment within real people where the conditions of struggle here changed: IN FAVOR OF DEVELOPING A REVOLUTIONARY FRONT IN THE METROPOLE.

The RAF noted the stark contrast between the optimistic, student-based, sixties left and the eighties “no future” rebels in the squats—“Cold, without illusions, expecting nothing from the state”—and, furthermore, viewed this as a positive development, explaining that, “This is the terrain upon which the revolutionary front in the metropole is now developing.” Despite conceding that it had made some errors, the RAF largely credited its own actions for this new hardline attitude:

[T]he dialectic of the ‘77 confrontation led to qualitatively new subjective conditions of struggle here and to the definite integration of contradictions in the center into the development, the imperative, and the possibility of international class war. In this sense, it came at the right time.

Finally, although Western Europe now stood alongside the Third World as a key site of struggle, the RAF continued to avoid the usual approach of identifying and naming social sectors that had a material interest in revolution. In no way did the May Paper represent a turn to the working class. Neither was it quite the same as the RZ's embrace of movementism, of variegated citizen complaints giving rise to multiple sites of resistance; nor, despite the appearance of groups like WAIW, were the antipatriarchal politics of Rote Zora in any way approximated.
⁷
Rather, the May Paper continued to build upon the RAF's traditional (ungendered) radical subjectivity, the idea that by experiencing the violence and repression of the capitalist state, and the sense of collectivity that came from fighting back alongside others, people might undergo a psychological break with the system. In
Serve the People,
written in 1972, it had been proposed that this break would lead people to join the guerilla; now the May Paper updated this to the somewhat more realistic view that they would rally to the “resistance” and its front:

We have already had this experience ourselves, and we are ready to share it with those we know: the decisive moment for the breakthrough, which shows how far we've come, is the struggle of those who have begun to act within the framework of this strategy, or who want to participate as subjects within the framework
of the anti-imperialist front. They have started to anticipate this within themselves and for themselves and to determine all political initiative and action from this perspective and toward this end. They think of everything they do from the perspective of the fighting front.

Initially, the RAF's line on radical subjectivity had drawn upon ideas circulating in the New Left, ideas which signaled a break with what was (somewhat unfairly) looked down upon as the narrow class focus and cultural conservatism of their predecessors. Radical subjectivity emphasized the view that for all its wealth, life in the metropole left people psychologically and culturally bereft. At times sounding like a distant echo of the Situationists or the Frankfurt School, the RAF had applied this analysis in a unique way by combining it with violent action and an anti-imperialist worldview.

It is not surprising that when the May Paper was released over ten years later, it too contained themes that one could hear being voiced by quite different political thinkers—thinkers who in the 1980s were now pondering the shortcomings of the New Left. Although the RAF had retained the idea of a primary contradiction, this had been projected outwards, onto the Third World; as such, within the metropole the RAF was now able to embrace not only the reality of multiple sites of resistance, but also the way in which a revolutionary identity could be forged
sui generis,
out of resistance itself, with no blueprint for the future required. At its most simple, this was expressed in the phrase (often mocked by detractors), that, “The revolutionary strategy here is simply a strategy against their strategy.”

While some might object that this could not provide a sustainable basis for action, and that its proponents were opening themselves up to a new host of errors, it did reflect the zeitgeist of the day. From the Revolutionary Cells to post-structuralist Marxists like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, by 1982 the blueprint and the big-theory-that-explains-it-all had fallen out of favor, in a philosophical turn whereby opposing suddenly seemed infinitely better than proposing. Such ideas were particularly attractive after the 1970s—a period during which the K-Groups in particular had pushed the grand narrative to absurd lengths—and especially among the
Autonomen.
Where the RAF distinguished itself was in declaring that it would harness this micropolitical anomie to what remained a quintessentially macropolitical project, the destruction of imperialism.

Yet, if the May Paper was intended to woo the
Autonomen,
it would have mixed results at best. While the idea of the guerilla and the militant
left working in tandem was appealing, it was noted that even in this “self-critical” document, the May Paper's authors continued to place themselves at the center of the struggle, taking it for granted that the left should orient itself around the RAF. Furthermore, many people felt that the entire front strategy echoed that of the Revolutionary Cells, and yet the RZ was never directly referred to at any point in the document.

As one
Autonomen
critique, published in
radikal,
put it,

The so-called new, positive orientation is woolly and ill-defined. The new movements are not named nor are their motivations analyzed. They are only referred to in the context of the conflict between the state and the guerilla. The authors see the guerilla in the traditional vanguardist manner in which it is coterminous with the RAF. The armed struggle of the RZ and the independent cells, which played an important role in spreading armed and militant struggle within the left, is never mentioned. For the first time, the political significance of militant struggles alongside the guerilla is recognized. It is suggested that all three milieus must form a common front. The paper says little about what the nature of this front will be. The RAF is seen as the force around which other movements are arrayed, without the nature of the connection between them being clarified. The “strategy” as expressed in the paper is formal and empty, presenting little more than an “everyone together against the system” line.
⁸

Twenty-five years after the fact, Karl-Heinz Dellwo (who had been transferred to Celle prison, where he would remain until his release in 1995) remembered his own reaction to the May Paper in very similar terms: